For a fair summary of Labour’s Crewe campaign, see John Harris and Labour Home.  This, too, is relevant.

Labour’s antics have been disgusting.  Playing on class and race, Labour has taken its voters for fools.  They have engaged in the most hypocritical and cheap campaign.  The real question is why?  They had £2.7bn to throw about, and 7000+ votes to hold.  They have the power of the government to throw behind a seat 165 places down the Tory target list.  Why on earth would you cheapen your core vote and alienate any other potential supporters?

The only suggestion I can make is that they have accepted failure and want something to blame it on.  Bad campaign, nasty tricks, hypocrisy and the seat is lost.  Nothing to do with Gordon Brown, of course.  Call me cynical, but I cannot see any other reason why any political strategist in the world would think this kind of campaign is a good idea.

Lesson #1 of politics: if you don’t want to answer a question, don’t accept the premise of the question.  Try to spot Alistair Darling’s denial that the £2.7bn of new public debt is a by-election swindle.  I couldn’t.

The Tories look likely to win the by-election in Crewe and Nantwich.  The latest poll puts it as Con 43, Lab 39, Lib Dem 16.  That’s a Labour seat of 25 years a 7028 majority potentially sliding its way down the electoral lavatory.  Shit in Mr. Brown’s tea?  I fear so.

It’s hardly surprising, though. By all accounts, Labour have run a campaign so poor in C&N they deserve to be roundly thrashed by the Beauties for Britain candidate.  First, they parachute in Tamsin Dunwoody, spawn of Gwyneth, arrogantly counting on the family name to win them the votes.  Treating voters in local elections as if they’ll simply be taken in by a name rather than what someone can actually do for a community is patronising in the extreme, and will be seen as such.  Especially when the daughter is imposed before her mother is even buried, which seems a little insensitive…

That shouldn’t kill it, though.  It’s arrogant and insensitive, but not fatal (hah…?).  A weak, weak campaign would do, though.  And that is what Labour have run.  Brown hasn’t shown up to support Dunwoody, while Clegg and Cameron have.  Dunwoody hasn’t based her attacks in reason, or trying to show the complete shallowness of Cameron’s D’Israeli Resurrection Project, but equally shallow personal slurs.  The Tory candidate, Edward Timpson, is a millionaire, she says, and lives in a big country house.  He is thus a bastard aristo that must be stopped.

This leaflet is typical.  Two points attack Timpson’s background; two make vague neanderthal policy points that sound more like Michael Howard than Michael Howard; and the final is generic.  There’s little substantial there, and no reason to actually vote for Labour, rather than another alternative to the Tories.

It won’t work.

Does it never occur to the Labour strategists that Tony Benn - sorry, Viscount Stangate, Retired - was a bastard aristo too?  The electorate doesn’t care.  They care about the words that spill forth from a candidate’s mouth, not their bank balance.  Painting Cameron as an unreconstructed Bullingdon shit hasn’t worked; painting BoJo as an unreconstructed Bullingdon shit didn’t work; and it won’t work with Timpson.

If nothing else, because he went to Durham…

The way to deal with a weak candidate - and the Tories are still weak when it comes to policy, ultimately - is to attack their weak policies, and provide a strong alternative.  Attacking their character instead simply masks what strong policies you do have, and ever worse, makes it look like you’re covering for a lack of them.

That’s what has turned this by-election upside down.  All Timpson has had to do is keep his mouth shut, write the odd angry letter about the 10p tax rate, and leave the rest up to Dunwoody and the Lib Dems, who’ve run a similar campaign.

Never mind national politics, Labour look like they’d have lost there anyway…